Author Archives: David

Upcoming Presentations

Posted on by David

I’ll be speaking at 2 sessions at ASAE’s Annual Meeting in Minneapolis next month.
The first is a preconference session called Building Bridges: IT as a Strategic Partner. The portion of the session I am involved in will focus on how to get IT involved in the overall strategic planning and execution of the organization. The second part of the program will take a detailed look at the current state of the association management system industry, which is the biggest technology investment for most associations (just slightly ahead of the web these days).

The second is a concurrent session called Web Technologies for the Future. The session is built around William Gibson’s quote: “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” Non-profit organizations are typically the last on the technology distribution list, so there is lots of stuff we can talk about that have not penetrated our industry yet.

Microsoft Content Management Server

Posted on by David

We have been using Microsoft’s Content Management Server in production for almost a year at this point. A while back I added a page of MCMS resources and links to the High Context Wiki. Feel free to add to the page if you have additional info/links/etc.

There must not be a lot of MCMS information sites out there. My little wiki page shows up very high in the Google results for many MCMS searches.

New Blog Software for High Context

Posted on by David

I’ve cut my weblog over to WordPress from MT. Most permalinks and the RSS feed should automatically go to the new location of the content. Let me know if you see any weirdness going on. I’m still working on the categories which are a bit of a mess.

KMpings is still running on MT and should behave as before. I also discovered a couple of posts that I had left in draft mode in MT and forgot about. They are now published here.

Associations: Social Network Concierge

Posted on by David

I had a conversation yesterday that sparked an idea for me of one possible direction associations could move in to remain relevant with their members.

Associations have often served as the social network for a profession, research community, or other group of like-minded individuals and/or organizations. Much effort has been and continues to be put into creating vehicles such as member directories to encourage networking. However, those efforts almost always rely on members proactively providing data via paper and web-based forms and exposing that data to them with anemic search interfaces. Many members choose not to participate or do not provide enough information to create meaningful links.

What if an association focused much of its energy and resources on enhancing the quality of the metadata about each member, their professional activities and work, and the connection of all of those elements to the greater community of members? That web of data could then be made available to members via effective search tools targeted at enhancing professional networking. The association could also develop targeted networking products such as events and meetings that leverage that data.

I’m imagining something like LinkedIn combined with PubMed and your typical association management system data, with a cadre of indexers constantly expanding and maintaining the data. (PubMed being a metadata repository for health care research. Only relevant as a healthcare association example.)

Ultimately the association would serve as a sort of social network concierge, facilitating meaningful and productive connections by working hard to capture and contextualize data about their members.

The Role of Technology in a CMS Selection Process

Posted on by David

James Robertson has published a briefing on Specifying technology in a CMS tender. I agree with his overall premise but have a few comments on some of the specifics. First a quote:

In short, by focusing on the technology aspects, these tenders often fail to select the best product, and don’t deliver the desired business benefits.

For this reason, we encourage those developing tenders to concentrate on the business requirements, and minimise the technical details.

That being said, there is a legitimate need to specify specific technology issues. This briefing presents some guidelines for doing so, in a way that will generate the best outcomes.

The main point, that the technology is irrelevant if you don’t have criteria that will support your overall business objectives, is right on the money. Assuming you have that part down, I think it is very important to play to your IT strengths if at all possible.

One factor not mentioned specifically in the article is that CMS’ are typically high-maintenance beasts (in my experience). If it is running on a platform for which you already have experienced admins, your life will be much easier. There are a lot of not very well documented tweaks and tricks to keep servers and systems running optimally. You’ll need knowledgable admins for a CMS that bears significant load.

Also, staff expertise in the CMS coding language is more important than given here, I think. Without it you are completely at the mercy of contractors to make modifications, no matter how minor. If you have one or more staff who know the language you can make the minor adjustments that tend to come up pretty frequently without having to spend consulting money nor take the time to secure the resources. You can be more nimble by making those small adjustments yourself and save the cash for major development and integration projects.

License Expired! Pop-up Error with Zend Demo and Apache/PHP on Windows

Posted on by David

This thread has the answer to why a pop-up window suddently began to appear when I booted up my Windows XP box at home. I had installed Apache and a demo of the Zend PHP editor. The pop-up error began once the demo license expired yet it gave no indication of what system was causing the error. I thought I had gotten infested with a virus until a little googling turned up that thread above. Zend needs to improve that error to something meaningful.